BIO

Henna Aho is a multidisciplinary artist known for large-scale, material-based constructions that merge fine art, folk art, and design. Her practice explores home and belonging while engaging with themes of dependency, fragility, and alienation. The form of the painting expands as objects, architectural spaces, and tactile surfaces partially replace paint. Emotional—even awkward—handwoven constructions interact with painted or industrially produced surfaces, revealing how human imperfection is both protected and challenged within complex, shifting environments. Together, these elements form what she calls a psycho-material matrix, mirroring the human body — shaped, sustained, and nurtured within its surroundings. 

Henna Aho holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Arts and Design Helsinki. She has received grants, residencies and commissions from various organizations such as the Kone Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Yaddo (NY, USA, 2025) and the Vermont Studio Center (VT, USA, 2024). She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Salon ACME (Mexico City MEX, 2024), TM Gallery (Helsinki FI, 2024), Galleri F15 (Moss NO, 2024), KCCC (Klaipeda LT, 2023) and Forum Box (Helsinki FI, 2022). Her work is represented in the collections of prominent institutions such as the Saastamoinen Foundation, HAM the Helsinki Art Museum, the Oulu Art Museum, the City of Turku and the Finnish State Art Commission. For the period 2024-26 Aho has been awarded the Henry Lönnfors Atelier Fellowship, which includes a stipend and a studio.

”Beyond the seemingly cryptic titles, Aho’s object-based works act like diaries of her daily life, documenting the content of her time and existence, whilst freezing precious moments and expressing personal experiences and memories. Interweaving diverse materials and ready-made objects as paint strokes, Aho maintains a painter’s perspective, entwining diverse emotions within complex layers and compositions, capturing important constants – that offer her comfort in everyday life counteracting anxieties and other sensibilities. The chaos and healing within these threads go beyond the textiles themselves. In the works, seemingly incongruous objects and materials meet and merge in poetically tactile ensembles, playfully caught up together, in a kind of lifejacket to keep one afloat. Beyond this, her works experiment with the medium of painting, expanding it as both medium, process and subject. Weaving too serves both as a conceptual current and medium as materials, processes or objects are partially exposed, let go of, or even absent.” 

– Mamie Beth Cary (the Director of von Bartha in Copenhagen DK) and Claire Mary Anne Gould ( A Chief Curator in Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg DK)